Monday, October 16, 2017

David Lynch has created some of the scariest moments on
film. The infamous scene behind Winkie’s Diner has been rated cinema’s scariest
scene more than once. Twin Peaks has
been named television’s scariest show. Eraserhead,
Lost Highway, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, INLAND
EMPIRE, and of all things, The
Elephant Man have been categorized as horror movies through the years.
However, Lynch has never really been a horror film director. Rather he works
horror into his work in the same way that he works in comedy and melodrama, and
because he does not really make films we expect to hit the beats of specific
genres, those moments of humor, naked emotion, and terror always hit harder than
they would in genre pictures because they are so unexpected.

However, there is one David Lynch film that really does
mirror one particular horror classic: Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.That distinction is an important one
since Blue Velvet has very little in
common with Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella. It has more in common with John
S. Robertson’s silent adaptation starring John Barrymore from 1920, which is
the version that sees the introduction of significant female characters into
the story. Jekyll is to marry Millicent Carew, a young representative of
“respectable” society. Hyde takes up with Gina, an artist and dance hall girl
who represents the seedier side.

These characters take on greater significance in Samuel
Hoffenstein and Percy Heath’s Oscar-nominated script for Mamoulian’s sound
remake. The split in Frederic March’s Jekyll is made explicit even before he
drinks the potion that draws out his monstrous id. He longs for a traditional
(yet sexually active) relationship with Muriel Carew (Rose Hobart), the
daughter of a respected brigadier general. He is also drawn to the sexually
uninhibited dance-hall singer Ivy Pierson (Miriam Hopkins), whom he attends to
after she is attacked by a brute.

However, Hyde is only embodied by MacLachlan in odd moments
of weakness, as when Jeffrey spies on Dorothy undressing after sneaking into
her apartment or strikes her after she commands him to during a bout of kinky
sex. More often, Jeffrey’s id-self wears a totally different face a la Hyde. That face belongs to Dennis
Hopper’s Frank Booth, a monster who keeps Dorothy emotionally imprisoned in a
constant state of agitated terror to extract physically abusive sex from her
just as that other vile bully Hyde keeps Ivy trapped in a grotesque “love nest”
for identical purposes. To make their shared-Jekyll/Hyde split explicit, Frank
whispers to Jeffrey “You’re like me.” Like Jekyll, Jeffrey is a “good” person torn-apart
by ugly behavior he believes he is incapable of controlling.

For fans of both films, the cables between Blue Velvet and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are too strong to miss; yet I would never
imply that David Lynch wove them intentionally. While Lynch reportedly saw
horror classics such as The Fly, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Thing from Another World during his
youth, there is no evidence he’d ever seen Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which had been out of distribution since
the release of the weak-tea remake in 1941 in any event. There’s no evidence
Lynch saw that film either, though it does offer one more delicious connection
to ponder: its Ivy was played by Ingrid Bergman— none other than Isabella
Rossellini’s mother.

Bergman and Rossellini: mother/daughter Ivy figures.

In 1999, interviewer Michael Sragow brought up the
recurring Jekyll/Hyde theme in Lynch’s work to the director, but only
specifically as it pertains to Alvin Straight in The Straight Story and Lynch didn’t let on that he has seen any
version of Stevenson’s story. So it may be a bit extreme to label Blue Velvet a “remake” despite its
numerous, tantalizing similarities to Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but the two movies might still make for a fascinating
double feature this Halloween season.

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Following The Last
House on the Left and The Hills Have
Eyes —two super low-budget horror flicks that are now regarded as genre
classics— Wes Craven brought his schlock-shock vision to the small screen with
a movie based on Lois Duncan’s 1976 novel Summer
of Fear. The film stars Linda Blair as Rachel, a teenage girl skeptical of
her cousin Julia (Lee Purcell), who has come to stay with Rachel’s family after
Julia’s parents croak in a mysterious car accident. As it turns out, Julia’s
got some evil juju running through her, and she makes it her mission to cause
trouble for Rachel and her kin.

When I first saw Summer
of Fear (which I knew as Stranger in
Our House, the title by which it originally aired) at the age of five or
six, it terrified me. Terr-i-fied
me.Its insidious “I’m the only
one who realizes the monster is a monster” premise, hellish climax, and queasy
slow-mo closing credits gave me years of nightmares. No exaggeration. Rewatching
Summer of Fear nearly forty years
later, I no longer find it particularly scary, but it is great fun as a time
capsule of super-seventies fright wigs (perms for everyone!) and polyester wardrobe and quite effective as simple horror premise. Blair is
very good as the initially petulant, increasingly harried, ultimately heroic teen, and she and Lee
Purcell have terrific antagonistic chemistry. It’s also interesting to see Wes
Craven tone down his trademark nastiness for a subtler approach to
horror.

On the cusp of its fortieth anniversary, Summer of Fear comes to Blu-ray via
Dopplegänger
Releasing. The film looks its age with a fair share of scratches, specs, and
blotches. The picture is generally softand grainy, but it is still very
watchable. Interior scenes tend to be dark and low on detail, but exterior daytime scenes look good and the overall clarity seems to improve about halfway through the movie. Extras include a commentary by Wes Craven’s, which has been ported
over from Artisan’s 2003 DVD, a short image gallery, and a neat new 13-minute
on screen interview with Linda Blair, who discusses the film’s casting, her
rapport with that cast, Wes Craven’s directing style, a disturbing stunt involving a horse
that clearly made an impression on animal rights activist Blair.

Friday, October 13, 2017

In August 1999, Joe Jackson performed at tiny Joe’s Pub in
NYC, his voice and piano accompanied only by Gary Burke’s drums and Graham
Maby’s bass. Considering the lack of guitar and the fact that the show took
place amidst Jackson’s retreat from pop, one might assume the performance had
some sort of jazz trio pretentions. But with Burke’s hard hitting and Maby’s
trademark vicious attack, the set was pure Rock & Roll. It also formed the
basis of a CD called Summer in the City:
Live in New York released in 2000.

With Jackson looking back on his rocker days, it was
appropriate that his original selections not only relied exclusively on the
seventies and eighties, but that they also included oldies by The Beatles,
Yardbirds, Steely Dan, and as the CD’s title reveals, The Lovin’ Spoonful
(though there are nods to jazz in his covers of Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo”
and The Ramsey Lewsi Trio version of “The In Crowd”). Refreshingly, the covers
and the punkish early cut “One More Time” retain all their thrust in this
stripped down setting. This is in no small way due to the awesome Maby. With
his 5-string bass, he supplies all the strings any Rock band could need as he
adds some (in Joe’s words) “very deep bass” to “Fools in Love” and whips off a
thrilling solo on “Another World”. All hail Graham.

Because it was recorded in the dedicatedly digital age, Summer in the City: Live in New York may
seem an odd choice for the audiophile label Intervention Records (who’d
previously reissued Jackson’s Look Sharp!,
I’m the Man, and Night and Day), which normally goes to length to use a completely
analog process in its reissues.* But even with only “high quality files” from
the original DATs available, this double-vinyl release sounds superb with Maby
and Burke rattling the floorboards and Jackson’s voice soaring over them with
remarkable clarity on quiet 180-gram vinyl.

*Update: Shane Buettner of Intervention Records had the following to say about the process of mastering Summer in the City:
Live in New York:

“I definitely specialize in 100% analog mastering, because so few labels do that. However,
my ethos is to be truest to the master source. For this project there
was analog tape, but as the master source was native digital, the
digital sounded best and that’s what I used. In
this case it’s important to note the HUGE impact of going from the
16-bits of the CD to the 24-bit source files we used. 24-bits is 256
times the resolution of 16-bits! In addition, the original CD had several
dB of dynamic compression whereas we didn’t employ any.”

Thursday, October 12, 2017

The Twilight Zone
ran for 156 episodes written by 40-something different writers and featuring
way more actors and actresses than I’m willing to count. You can literally fill
an encyclopedia with this stuff, and that’s just what Steven Jay Rubin
literally did with The Twilight Zone
Encyclopedia.

Running for 424 packed pages, Rubin’s book discusses every
episode, every writer, every director, every major theme (aliens, children,
time travel, etc.), every significant location or item (Sunnyvale Rest home from
“Kick the Can”, Talky Tina from “Living Doll”, etc.), and nearly every actor
and actress who appeared in the series’
original run (understandably, people like Phil Arnold, who played “Man” in “Mr.
Dingle, the Strong” and Jimmy Baird, who played “Boy” in “The Changing of the
Guard” are a bit too much for our valiant author). And the original run is Rubin’s main concern, which he makes very
clear in his book’s introduction, although he still manages to slip in a good
deal of information about, for example, Twilight
Zone: The Movie in his entry on “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”.

Rubin doesn’t make room for potential entries about such original
series-related items as all the merchandise The Twilight Zone spawned or The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror” episodes that so wonderfully
parody so many classic Zones, but we
do get a lot that saves the book from being redundant in light of The Twilight Zone Companion, Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a
Television Classic, IMDB, and Wikipedia. There are quotes from new
interviews with a slew of people involved with the original series, odd bits of
trivia (example: Russ Meyer was a still photographer for the series! Nina
Roman-Rhodes, who played the maid in “Miniature”, was one of the few people who
reported seeing a second gunman at the site of JFK’s assassination!), and quite
a few unusual photos (my favorite: Gary Crosby of “Come Wander with Me”
monkeying with an electric bass). Ten pages of Rod Serling’s final interview is
a cool addition too even though the creator barely mentions The Twilight Zone at all.

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Before the eighties, the funnies proved they could be smart
(Doonesbury) or weird (try reading
some classic Superman strips), but it
was only during the decade of Calvin and
Hobbes and The Far Side that they
really became both. And it all really started with Bloom County. Like Doonesbury,
Bloom County had politics on its mind
but its talking animals, geeky reference points, surrealism, and all-out
anarchy made it a hell of a lot more fun than Garry Trudeau’s strip. Despite
its mission to expose greed and hypocrisy in contemporary society,its refusal to accept war and bigotry as anything but shameful and horrific, and its sheer silliness, Bloom Countyalso had awistfultone that often made it poignant and utterly human
even when the cast consisted of a neurotic penguin (or was Opus a puffin?), an ultra-conservative bunny, a bigoted groundhog, and a scraggly
cat hooked on more shit than Keith Richards.

Reading Bloom County
today, it is striking how well it holds up despite how topical it was.
Actually, its topicality is one reason why it is still such a great read since
it functions as a bit of a history lesson and a bigger bit of a nostalgia trip
with its references to Pac-Man, Rubik’s Cubes, “Where’s the Beef”, and other eighties
touchstones. The surreal nature of history keeps some of this stuff relevant
too. Who would have thought we’d still be concerned with the idiotic antics of
a certain talentless, tactless, conscienceless real estate tycoon whom
Breathed roasted back in the Bloom
County days by placing his “brain” in the body of Bill the Cat?

IDW is now collecting the entirety of those days in a
two-volume set you could flatten a cat with. The Bloom County-esque punchline of The
Real Classy Compleat Bloom County 1980-1989 is that it isn’t especially
classy at all. The soft covers are only mocked up to look like cracked lather,
though they are housed in a heavy slipcase. While some IDW books load on the
extra features, this set only features a one-page introduction by Breathed, who
is still as fixated on our idiot president as he was before the idiot became
president (and no, kids, we do not get a reissue of the Billy and the Boingers
flexi-disc featuring those classic hits “U Stink but I ♥ U”
and “I’m a Boinger”). That’s not a problem, though, since Bloom County was never particularly concerned with being classy. The most crucial word in the title is no joke: compleat. Well, considering the archaic
spelling, maybe it’s a little bit of a joke. Ack!

Monday, October 9, 2017

Way-hey, kids! Are you ready to have some fun? Because I’m
the fun fellow with the floppy feet who loooooves to have fun! I love all kinds
of fun! Like luring you into the sewer to play with my collection of balloons! They
float! They all float down here, kids, and when you’re down here with me,
you’ll float too! Sounds like fun, don’t it? I may take your arm, but just
consider that the price of admission to my fun, fun sewer circus! You’re not
scared, are you? I’m just the friendly, funny fellow with the floppy shoes, and
everyone knows that a clown is a kid’s best friend, right? Right?

Wrong! In fact, the creepy clown has become such a common
horror figure that it’s hard to imagine there was a time when children laughed
along with the likes of Clarabell, Bozo, and Ronald McDonald. These days it
seems that the easiest way to get distribution for a cheap-o, direct-to-video
(sorry…I mean “direct-to-streaming”) horror movie is to stick a leering, fanged
clown in it. Stitches (2012), Sloppy the Psychotic (2012), Mockingbird (2014), All Hallow’s Eve (2013), and of course, Clown (2014) are just a few of these fun flicks.

Friday, October 6, 2017

Close Encounters of
the Third Kind was special in the sci-fi pantheon for the way it invited
viewers to contemplate the galaxy and consider that what was out there may
actually be friendly. Steven Spielberg’s motivation for making the film was
ultimately noble and humane (despite a lead character who abandons
his family to go star hopping), but it would not have worked without startling
visuals to make us believe there really is something out there worth
contemplating. With inestimable assistance from people such as cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, concept artist
George Jensen, art director Joe Alves, and special effects-Merlin Douglas Trumbull, Spielberg delivered
those visuals spectacularly. So a visual history of Close Encounters seems a natural publication for the film’s
fortieth anniversary, and the visuals in Michael Klastorian’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Ultimate Visual History deliver the
goods in the form of stills, Jensen’s impressionistic paintings, behind-the-scenes
snap shots, images of deleted and aborted scenes, and clearer looks at the Mothership and aliens than we get in the film (though these photos reveal why the phony looking aliens had to be muted by
creative lighting in the film).

However, what makes Klastorian’s book truly special is
access. Spielberg, himself, not only opened his archive of materials for inclusion
but also his memories, granting personal interviews and even penning the
foreword. Stars Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Cary Guffey, and Bob Balaban,
as well as such off-screen magicians as Trumbull and Alves, are similarly generous with
their recollections in new interviews conducted exclusively for this book. Of
course, Close Encounters is a
milestone movie, so it had already been documented pretty well and a lot of the
stories they tell won’t be super revelatory to long-time fans, but finer details on the production probably will be, and in any event, it is nice to
have the whole story collected in such an attractive package. The idea
to stick detachable production notes, art, script pages, storyboards, and other
memorabilia onto the pages with gummy glue wasn’t the best one, since these
inserts are probably easily damaged and a bit disruptive to the book’s design
if they aren’t detached, but as a whole, Close
Encounters of the Third Kind: The
Ultimate Visual History is a gorgeous way to pay tribute to a sci-fi
picture with ideas and images that still instill wonder after forty years.